I'm Judging You Read online

  To be ultrareal, ride-or-die expectations usually fall on the shoulders of women who often don’t get the same level of commitment from their men. Men do not get told repeatedly to stand by their women no matter how much drama they bring into their lives. They get the message that they always have more choices. Meanwhile, women are told to stand beside and behind our partners in spite of their foolishness.

  I can be loyal, but loyalty isn’t blind commitment to cosigning on stupidity and bad decisions. Once my life starts being affected by your tomfoolery, I might have to moonwalk out. Some people have gone to jail for their boos, and I applaud them for their courage. That could not be me. If it comes down to me or you, trust I’m picking me. I can’t fight, and my hair products are out here, so as you see, it would be harder for me inside. Thanks for understanding!

  If we’re both mature and grown, neither of us would want to put our partner in a situation that would put their livelihood and happiness in jeopardy. If you’re constantly acting a fool, it means you aren’t considering me in your actions, because clearly you don’t care how they could affect your loved ones.

  Call me simple, but I think baehood needs to come in less dramatic packages. My love motto is that my relationship should push me to be a better person. My partner should encourage me, challenge me, seduce me, and build me. I will aim to do the same. At any point in time, one person might be holding the other up, because isn’t that part of being a team? You might have an off day, but your teammate picks up the slack. That’s fine. There are times you’ll both have an off day. Recalibrate and come back. Maybe the off day becomes an off week or off months. That’s when you have to determine if you need to be on the same team at all.

  If, of course, during the off week one of you goes and does something they weren’t supposed to, like Ross did to Rachel, and a break baby happens, then all bets are off. Can we talk about break babies? OMG. Talk about true pettiness. You’re having a rough time with your boo, so you go and have sex with someone else? Petty. But a break baby means you went and had sex with someone who is not your partner without taking proper safety precautions. You didn’t use a condom? What in the hell is wrong with you?! I get that you might be distraught, but come on, bruh. Come on, sis. The least you can do is make sure you wrapped up. Not only are you being careless about yourself, you’re also being careless with your partner’s health. Break babies are beautiful. (Because all babies are beautiful. Even when they’re funny looking, especially in those first few weeks when most of them look like baked potatoes—still beautiful human beings.) However, in the words of Dorothy Zbornak, the Sorceress of Shade, “CONDOMS, ROSE! CONDOMS!” Being on a temporary break doesn’t mean you need to go dip your stick into anyone, or have your love pocket7 dipped into with no protection.

  Break babies are extreme, but baehood can go bad in much simpler ways. I’ve never been the type to check a significant other’s phone or text messages or ask where they’re going. I don’t care where you’re going, and I trust that you won’t show up and act out. We’ve set certain boundaries and expectations in our relationship, and it is your prerogative to keep those in check. It is up to you to know what you can and cannot do. If you cannot tell me about it, then odds are you weren’t supposed to do it and you feel guilty. That in itself is wrong. I did not attend any academies, so it is not my job to police you or try to catch you in any act. If I get to the point where I feel the need to do that, I’d just rather walk away, because it means you’ve lost my trust, and without that we have nothing left. Our foundation is cracked, and I’m not living in a shaky house. Leave if you can no longer be secure in what you’ve built. Fake forgiving-and-forgetting is pointless if you will always resent that person, or hold it over their head. I know myself. It’s really hard for me to get over betrayals or lack of trust. Jesus forgives; I pout. This is why it’s better for me to end things, because I will feel some type of way about you for a while. I would rather get that out of my system by myself than force a relationship to continue.

  I do what’s right for me, but of course after the breakup happens I’ll be on my couch for weeks eating all the rice and ice cream and watching movies about why love sucks. I might even call you once to tell you how much you suck. But I cope.

  You can do bad all by yourself, ladies and gentlepeople.

  4. Under the Knife

  You know how I know we’ve all crossed over the point of no return from doing the most with the absolute least? Anal bleach exists.

  The day I saw an ad for anal bleach, I knew we had passed the point of no return, done a double backflip to the beginning, and run three more victory laps. We are at the point where we are so bent on perfection that we will lighten the inner sanctums of our assholes to achieve better beauty. The anus is the hole the body’s garbage comes out of. We expect THAT to be pleasing to look at, too? I know for some it is a venue of pleasure (not that there’s anything wrong with that), but still. Fascinating.

  Can we stop? Can my prostate mouth be dark and brooding in peace? Why do we need our butt nostrils cosmetically whitened? Does my derriere tunnel really need to shine bright like a diamond? Come on, everybody. Do you do a photo shoot after the anal bleaching to show it off, or is this just for your own enjoyment? Like, when you’re walking down the street, newly bottom-brightened, are you smiling to yourself with the satisfaction of your own personal “Let there be light”? Maybe she’s born with it. Maybe it’s anal bleach!

  Gahtdambit, everyone. Why are we doing this? Who is this really for? People say “I did it for myself,” but that’s not correct. Unless you’re really staring at your asshole in a mirror, day in and day out, disappointed that it has never reached its true fluorescent potential naturally, then that’s not that accurate. When we die, will anyone exclaim over how light our anuses were in their rousing eulogies? Will the great loves of our lives remember fondly how pale our yansh-holes were?8 Who gives a flying fuck? We’re doing all of these things because we live in a world that has dropped a metric ton of pressure on us to be beautiful and made the definition of that beauty incredibly narrow and impressively unreachable. I am judging us for our shallowness, our impossible beauty standards, and our desperation to reach them.

  Some people frown upon women using makeup to enhance their features and to feel more beautiful. I enjoy makeup as much as the next person, although I will say some of the ways we paint our faces gives me pause, like when we draw on our eyebrows and they end up looking like EKGs or other vital signs. But I don’t think it’s necessarily harmful. Here’s what is: Do a Google Images search for the word “beauty.” What comes up are pages and pages of pictures of white women. Even our number one search engine, no matter how algorithmic and formulaic its methods, equates beauty with lightness. If you yearn to be considered beautiful, wouldn’t something like that lead you to think that to be beautiful you need to have less melanin in your skin? Around the globe, “White is right” is the message, and caste systems exist based on color; usually at the bottom of the ladder are Black and brown people. Folks face acute discrimination because of their darker skin, and there’s a major color complex that can be seen globally, across many cultures.

  Centuries of hailing whiteness as the goal have gotten too many people believing that their dark skin nullifies their beauty. There are few things that make my heart as sad as the reminder that there are people in the world who are unhappy enough about their skin color that they’d cosmetically lighten themselves. Our skin is our natural coat and our largest organ. Our skin carries our history, whether white or Black or yellow. Our skin is part of our cultural heritage and is important in defining who we are.

  Too many people believe that their dark skin voids their beauty. Some have been teased about their color by family, enough to where they start believing that something is wrong with the richness of their skin. The media thrusts those who are fair-skinned into the spotlight; even photography leans toward the preference of lighter-skinned people. All around us, the messag
e is that the darker you are, the more inconvenient your beauty is. So I get how people could internalize all of that enough to where they artificially lighten their skin.

  Skin lightening is a global issue, but I can only speak to my experience as a Nigerian. In Nigeria, bleaching is not uncommon. I do not want to speak out of turn in saying it has been normalized, but it sure feels like it. Folks refer to it as “toning” to make themselves feel better. Stores are littered with “toning creams” and ads with light, bright women, encouraging you to get your lightening on. Now, imagine that: a country where Black is the default, and yet people still feel pressure to lighten their skin. Even in a country full of Black people, we still cannot get away from colorism and the effects of our “white is right” ideas. Of course, there’s the fact that Nigeria is a country that was colonized by the British until it gained independence in 1960. My mother was five years old when colonialism slinked back to Great Britain, but I have no doubt that its effects linger, and one of the ways they do is through the color complex the country is struggling with.

  It is always jarring to see bleaching up close, no matter how common it is. People you’ve known your entire life but haven’t seen in a year might show up looking like Casper the Friendly Ghost when they were previously the color of a Snickers bar, and no one can address the pink, bleached elephant in the room. We’re all just supposed to carry on like you didn’t run an eraser across your entire body. Meanwhile, I’m trying not to stare at your knuckles, which often refuse to take. It’s like knuckles try to keep the hope alive, to remind you that you’re lying like bad concrete. Knuckles are stubborn as hell. They are all about that telling-on-you life, and I appreciate it. The rest of you might be ivory, but those knuckles are a dead ebony giveaway.

  You know I have no act-right and can’t fix my face for a damb thing. Don’t roll up to me without warning me that you became the Coke Zero version of yourself. Can I get a heads-up, so that when I see you I don’t do a slow head tilt trying to figure out if I got cataracts, because surely this milky version of yourself must be an error in my visual field? Don’t surprise me by showing up looking all Michael Ealy when you used to be the color of Forest Whitaker. Your feet will be on a mission to betray you, too, because they maintain their old color. They are also stubborn as hell, I’ve learned. When your face and your feet and hands look like they belong to different people, I know that Team Bad Decisions will never run out of members.

  Gels and cream lighteners are often purchased off the shelf, or sometimes even mixed at home. Far too many people bleach without a dermatologist’s assistance, so the opportunity for error is vast. Folks are outside with green undertones in their skin, green veins showing through, dark feet and knuckles, and a yellow face, looking like a walking Jamaican flag. It is such a mess. You did all that just so you could look like Joseph’s Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, with skin of various shades, none that looks as good as your original one? Because when you decide to do this at home, without the care of a dermatologist, you will miss a spot. Or you’ll get a bad formula and end up looking like a Dalmatian. People are out here looking like the Ghost of Fail Past, Present, and Future. Jesus be some protection against skin cancer, too, because chemical removal of melanin cannot be healthy in the long run.

  Surely there’s gotta be consequences to forcefully removing melanin from your skin with chemicals. I can only imagine that some of the folks who are doing this will end up looking like raw chicken in twenty to thirty years after their skin gives up on them from decades of lightening. Because bleaching your skin isn’t something you do for one or two years and then stop. No. Melanin is resilient. It wants to come back and show out, so those who commit to being light against their natural complexion have to continue using creams to maintain the color. Melanin serves a purpose. It’s nature’s blessing and protection. It is natural SPF, and you’re opting to remove it from your skin. Self-hate is a vainglorious vagabond, iSweaterGawd.9

  The saddest part is that the shade of brown these folks were before was probably much better than whatever shade of light they’re trying to go for. I’m saddened by the fuckedup pathology of inferiority that causes such desperation that people will do something so drastic. Why try to change who you were born to be and force yourself into who you think everyone will find more beautiful? Society has failed people to the point where they feel they cannot like themselves in the skin they were born in.

  Whether it’s our skin or the other parts of our bodies that we feel the need to change, we are doing our absolute utmost to attain perfection we can never reach. With our constant need to be beautiful, the message is that our original selves are never enough. If we’re big, we want to be smaller. If we’re small, we wish we were bigger. This has me concerned about our current state of affairs as citizens of Earth. I think we’re officially taking our need for some narrow idea of beauty too far. Combining our global self-esteem issues with medical advancements, we are now at a point where plastic surgery has people doing themselves ultrawrong by having one, two, or twenty surgeries too many.

  Now, don’t get me wrong—I am not automatically against plastic surgery or other medical cosmetic enhancements. I admit that one day I might get tired of being the parliamentarian of the Itty Bitty Titty Committee. I bring the Doritos to our monthly meetings and sometimes I take notes, if I don’t fall asleep during the introductions. I’m mostly there for the chips, though. Anywho, if that day comes, I might opt to upgrade these boobs from a size “404 Error: Not Found” to a C-cup or something; a proper one-to two-cup improvement, like the subtle lady that I am. I’m not ruling out Botox, either. If these laugh lines start looking like crop circles in my face, I might opt for something. Maybe, maybe not. Needles in my face do scare the shit outta me. I got a nose ring once and I cried for twenty minutes afterwards.

  What I am against is cosmetic procedures (not medical necessities) that change what we look like to the point where we need new identification. That is what makes me frown. There are people who cannot even do Throwback Thursdays with the rest of us because they have brand-new faces and we’d all require receipts, two forms of ID, and their fingerprints. Why? Because they’ve opted to get facelifts, cheek implants, nose jobs, lip plumpers, chin shaves, and more. It is all too much.

  And keep in mind that not all plastic surgeries/surgeons are created equal. If someone will be cutting into your body, you should probably do your research on them. They need to come with references, background checks, and word-of-mouth praise, and their office should have a four-leaf clover plucked from nature above the entrance. Any old doctor can’t do it. This is not a thing where you want to go with the cheapest person you can find. This is not what you want to use Groupon to get a deal on. Go to the best of the best, so your face and body won’t look like the universe is laughing at you afterwards.

  After all, bad plastic surgery is like adding serious insult to injury. I’ve seen so many before-and-after shots where the “after” looked like a blooper reel. Every time that happens, an angel sings a sad song. People are out here shelling out thousands of dollars to be made to look like accidental cartoons. I’ve seen cheek implants that made someone look like Jafar from Aladdin. That surgeon was so damb petty. Boob jobs go awry far too often, too. I’ve seen some that look like two coconuts sitting next to each other, refusing to touch. Your implants should not look like they’re giving each other the silent treatment. They really should communicate better.

  And the people going from A-cups to GGG? First of all, why? That is a lot of boobage, and your chesticular region is gonna be all in shock. You go from ant bites to beach balls—OUCH. Why are you paying someone to give you shoulder and back pain? I will never understand that. Moderation does not need to take a nap when you’re getting yourself cut up.

  People are getting nose jobs that make their nostrils so small that they whistle when they inhale. Facelifts got their skin pulled so tight that it looks like it might hurt every time they have to blink, and their l
ips are so big and bloated that they look like they have a permanent allergic reaction to shellfish after a night at Red Lobster for an Endless Shrimp dinner.

  To make matters worse, now teenagers are getting in on the action. Are their faces even fully developed? I’m pretty sure I made that up, but let’s go with it. It’s absurd to allow a fifteen-year-old to get cosmetic surgery. What do they know about true beauty at that age? At fifteen, I thought denim suits were high fashion. I knew nothing. I also thought I was a size nine shoe, when I’m really a seven. I can’t even explain this. All I know is from my sophomore year of high school until college I bought size nine shoes and always wore thick socks. Then I got to college, tried on someone’s size seven shoes, and realized they fit me so well! So everyone’s shoes don’t flop when they walk? I had been wearing the wrong size for three years; I was a dumbass. That person should certainly never have had the option to get plastic surgery.

  Body dysmorphic disorder is a bombastic bastard. Surely it is to blame for some of these extreme surgeries people have. When they look at their reflection and see a funhouse-mirror version of themselves, of course they want to change it. See: Michael Jackson (may he rest peacefully) and Lil’ Kim (who went from being a Black woman in 1995 to now resembling an Asian mermaid).

  Just dambit. Dambit all. In the words of Queen RuPaul, “If you don’t love yourself, how in the hell you gonna love somebody else?”

  AMEN!

  People who are girth-blessed get hell for it, but then folks go and objectify them for having ample yanshes. So now it’s a thing, although Black people have had asses since forever. We (as a collective; not me) have been blessed with these bodies for centuries and we’ve been considered freaks for it (see: Saartjie Baartman). We’ve been ridiculed and made to feel like our bodies were somehow less than beautiful because we were pushing extra cushion. But then, one day, big booties started being celebrated in the mainstream. They became the new standard, and people started thinking they needed them to be beautiful.